Settling down with one of Nancy Thayer’s books is like spending time with an old friend. They’re easy to read and digest – a pleasant invitation to while away the hours on a lazy, warm day. Thayer is a wondrous good writer. It’s as if her words arrive on paper almost without effort. The author of 23 novels, she’s lived on Nantucket for many years, and sets her scenes in an idyllic location full of warmth and comfortable vistas.

Thayer’s characters inhabit a fictional world that many might dream about – a world of patchwork quilts, shiny floors and sunshine. It’s the stuff of dreams, froth blowing off the top of a wave. Thayer’s newest book, Island Girls, presents no departure from this formula. Three lovely and successful women in their 30s are spending the summer together. Arden and Meg are Rory Calhoun’s daughters, though each has a different mother (wives #1 and #2 to Rory), while Jenny was adopted by Rory as a child when he married his third wife. Now their handsome, rakish father has died, and his will stipulates that the three women must inhabit their father’s Nantucket home together for three months before they can sell it and go their separate ways.

All those marriages and divorces made for an uneasy and at best sporadic relationship among the three girls when they were growing up, but here they are, plopped down as captives together for the summer. Island Girls explores the initial tetchiness of their conversations, their defensive postures and sometimes unhappy early memories and, finally, their attempts to patch up their differences and live together amicably. As the book progresses, the women begin to connect more like a family, and the result is a lot of man talk, shopping together for outfits in expensive Nantucket boutiques, gourmet meals, cocktail parties and leisurely swims on an uncrowded beach. Just stuff we all do every day, right?

The author also describes in depth the hunky men (naturally!) who come into their lives, and how the three women face their insecurities about the opposite sex (think of untrustworthy Dad) as they prepare to leave their summer island cocoon. When an unexpected and unwelcome visitor arrives and confronts the whole group – including Rory’s widow and two exes – it’s just a temporary blip on the problem radar that the women set themselves to resolve.

Thayer’s strength lies precisely in her presentation of this fantasy as if it were a world in which we all might actually partake. However unlikely it would be in real life, all the loose ends get tied up in this modern-day version of the happily-ever-after fairy tale. This novel shows just what a good writer Thayer is, and how well she connects with readers, but sometime I’d love to see her focus that talent on a story with a bit more substance.